The Skin of the World: Horacio Coppola and Cinema

Abstract

During the 1930s, Horacio Coppola made two trips to Europe: December 1930–May 1931, and October 1932–August 1935. These trips were, in a precise manner of speaking, apprenticeship experiences. Apprenticeships in photography and in cinematography. Coppola had begun taking photos at the end of the 1920s but, before leaving for Europe, his understanding of photography was basically intuitive. On the other hand, at that time, he was already a consummate cinephile with a very thorough understanding of the current state of cinematography. In Europe, he directed three short films: Sueño (Traum, 1933), Un dique en el Sena (Un quai de la Seine, 1934) and Un domingo en Hampstead Heath (A Sunday in Hampstead Heath, 1935). From the first one to the last one, Coppola undergoes his own shift from the avant-garde to high modernism. Taken together, his three films reveal that, at least for a time, Coppola harbored the idea of devoting himself to cinema. In his itinerary as a photographer, cinema ended up taking a secondary position. But these films show that he investigated the specificity of the images in motion and that he searched to define a personal style and a gaze that is as revealing as it is non-transferable.